For me, the experience gave me the realization that everything is a hallucination, that all of your every day experience and thoughts are constructs, and that k

For me, the experience gave me the realization that everything is a hallucination, that all of your every day experience and thoughts are constructs, and that knowledge becomes as fundamental and intimate as the sensation of breathing or touching. If you're paying attention on psychedelics, you realize that your skull is your very own Plato's cave. Going from caffeine and occasional marijuana to mushrooms was wild. You'd have a better chance of learning how to fly a helicopter from a book than understanding what psychedelics will feel like by reading or listening. Naive users might get fooled by a niacin flush or placebo, but once you've experienced it (and paid attention) there's no way you'll mistake the real thing. It also gives you the perspective needed to appreciate music like Shpongle and hippie intellectuals like McKenna and Watts. If you haven't experienced psychedelics, you're like a blind person being told about colors. You literally can't understand it until you live through it. Like orgasms or childbirth or religious ecstasy, some things transcend mere explanation. Psychedelics are great since they give you a shortcut right into the matrix, and you're confronted with the fact that you are indeed in a simulation, and that your existence in relation to the rest of the universe isn't nearly as distinct and cleanly delineated as you thought. The radical changes in personality stem from whatever neural machinery that governs openness to experience. I think it makes sense that the change makes people less depressed and anxious. You allow yourself to pay attention to other things, and it becomes easier to avoid fixating and catastrophizing everything wrong in your life.